Initial setup 2019
Important note - the Portsdown transmitter has been designed to "work out of the box". Most things can be set-up from the touchscreen. A few more advanced functions require you to connect to your Portsdown over a network from a PC.
Note that if you have a 7 inch Touchscreen, you should start at "Set-up using a PC". You can then reboot and use your touchscreen.
- Do not connect a mouse, keyboard or monitor to the Raspberry Pi
- Do not load any device drivers including the Waveshare screen drivers
- Do not tinker with Linux commands
If you do, we don't have time to support you and will just advise you to reformat your SD card and start again!
Doing the initial set up
If you have a 3.5 inch touchscreen but want to adjust the advanced settings, you can look up your IP address from the info screen on Menu 2. If you have no working touchscreen (for example a 7 inch screen at Initial Setup), you will need to run the IP Scanner program on your PC - download it from Advanced IP Scanner and scan for devices; after a few seconds it will list all the devices on your network including one from the Raspberry Pi foundation - this is your RPi so note down the IP address listed against it. You can now close the IP scanner program.
Running the setup menu
Now you need to log on to your RPi using a PC over your home network (DO NOT connect a keyboard and monitor directly to the RPi). To do this you need to download an SSH Terminal application such as Putty to edit the set up menu - make sure you use a recent version of putty or it may reject the RPi security certificate.
- Open Putty or another SSH terminal program, enter the IP address of your RPi and open a connection. The first time that you do this, you will get a security warning; accept it. At the logon prompt enter the default username of "pi" and the password "raspberry".
- The Portsdown console menu will start automatically, and you should see the following screen on the PC:
The first thing that you should select is the correct display option. Use the arrow keys to highlight Option 5 System Setup and then press enter. Then highlight Display Type and press enter. Lastly, use the arrow keys to move the cursor to your display, and press the space bar to select it. Then press enter.
If you do not want to select any more advanced options, you can now highlight Option 8 Shutdown then press enter, and then highlight Reboot Now and press enter. Your selected display should work when the system reboots.
You need to use the console menu to select the following functions
- Autostart. This sets what happens when the Portsdown starts up.
- WiFi
- Display type as described above
- Enable/disable hardware shutdown button
- Restore the touch calibration to factory defaults
- Set up the Portsdown to continuously stream to the BATC Server (for a repeater)